Most everyone is well acquainted with the standard telephone answering machine. Such a machine is hooked up to a telephone and by means of a tape recorder device and magnetic tape, it records oral messages from the caller. While such a machine has the advantage of allowing the user to receive messages when he is not present and cannot answer the phone, it has several disadvantages:
(1) The owner of the machine must play back many minutes of taped voice messages just to know who has called. (2) The owner can not intelligently search for a specific caller's recorded message. (3) To retain a list for later callback after listening to messages, the owner must either keep tape unerased, or must copy down the list with a pen and paper. (4) The caller must speak his name, phone number, etc. into his phone which is then transmitted through the phone system and recorded on the answering machine on the other end of the line. Since many callers feel uncomfortable talking to machines, some callers don't leave messages and merely hang up the phone. (5) An additional inconvenience occurs when the user wishes to retrieve stored messages by phone. He must on occasion hang on the phone for many minutes for all recorded voice messages to be played in their entirety and must copy with pen and paper in order to have a hard copy. This is not only inconvenient, but may be quite costly, particularly if the call to retrieve messages is a long distance call and the user is interested in a particular message that is preceded by a number of lengthy, less interesting, voice messages.
A partial solution to many of these disadvantages was offered by the "Telephone Electronic Answering Device" (TEAD) by the present inventors, disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,304,968, which is incorporated herein by reference. The TEAD is capable of receiving and storing messages such as the callers' names and telephone numbers and times of receipt of such messages by converting dual tone-touch tone frequencies (DTMF) or rotary dial pulses, generated by the caller dialing his own phone number, into proper digital data representing the caller's phone number and indicating the caller's name if pre-stored in memory by the user. The entire pre-stored message could then be retrieved and displayed on command on a display provided on the TEAD or printed out to provide a permanent record.
The message stored by the TEAD, however, is limited. It only includes information pre-stored in its internal memory that is associated with a caller's phone number, or, in some instances, only the caller's number and the time of day. It is known that in many environments, caller's wish to leave more information in their messages, such as the urgency of the call. In many cases, a return call is not necessary if a simple descriptive message is left. With the TEAD, the user would have to call back the caller to get any such message in person, wasting time, effort and telephone line charges. The TEAD does provide some mechanism for leaving slightly more information by selecting from a limited menu of messages, such as "Urgent," but playing that menu for the caller takes time and the menu choices will only cover a very few limited choices of the messages that callers actually want to leave.
To retrieve messages over the phone, a similar TEAD can be used from a remote telephone. The user can call his own "base" TEAD and cause it to output the DTMF tones for all the received calls in rapid succession over the phone line. These are received acoustically by the remote TEAD and converted, as with the base TEAD, and displayed. Of course, the displayed messages have only the same limited information as the base unit's display.
Also currently available are voice mail systems, which organize voice messages according to the called party. Each stored message is associated with one or more persons that are service members of the voice mail system. Each voice message to a called party is then organized sequentially in chronological order as in the prior art sequential tape recording answering devices. These voice mail systems lack the ability to access a voice message selectively by name, since there is no way a user can determine the identity of any of the callers without listening to the messages.
It is also known that digital recording of voice messages can be used to replace the magnetic tape, but again selective accessing of a particular individual's messages in selective order is not possible.